developing resources

I think this year is one of cool stuff.
The ideas need to be simple enough to develop different ideas.
Today I found out about edCreate, an extension kit for the edison robot.
https://meetedison.com/edcreate/
It has been a day of trying to find a location in New Zealand that has these.

https://nicegear.nz/product/edcreate as well as http://www.mindkits.co.nz/edcreate.aspx.

I like the idea of the bag concept, I play on using this with one of my students, the idea is getting them working with the concepts of mechatronics.

The second idea is around developing Designing and Developing Digital Outcomes, https://papersignals.withgoogle.com/

What a great way to get students to develop ideas and concepts with voice technology. Consider the google home and amazon dot that are being released.

Third idea, this is currently being written as an assessment resource. Dealing with advanced programming and using the power of python parsing files.

LearnPath - araako

I have been busy doing some updates to a system that I am developing at school. LearnPath.



Or as the students know it as araako.com

Araako is a system to help students develop their understanding of the hub curriculum, their my being, my learning, my community.



























How can LearnPath show the following?



Students work through filling in different sections of araako through their profile.



Personality test, this is based on the https://www.16personalities.com/ personality test. This enables the student to put in what their personality type is. A way to remember then strengths. The personality types are one aspect we get students to look at how they learn, how they work with others. The different personality types of listed here. https://www.16personalities.com/personality-types

Short story. In some ways this adds a bit of humour to the area, having an opportunity to write something short provides opportunities for students to be creative.

Profile. Other social networks have it, why shouldn't this? The avatar needs to be changed to the community that they are in.

Habit that they are working on. The Hobsonville Habits allows students to select a habit that they are working towards, or a habit that they show strength in. This can be used in either way.

Goals, both personal and academic excellence.
Though, it could be nice rather than a graduate profile statement, to be a more learner focussed statement.

Academic Excellence Has developed the generic learning skills and the specific knowledge, skills and understandings that enable learners to excel in their chosen pathway.

Personal Excellence Has developed the personal values, dispositions and capabilities that enable the learners to lead a happy, healthy and successful life.

Developing understanding through the Hobsonville Habits, allowing students to delve deeper using the habit cards to understand and show strengths and weaknesses.



Personalising the header colour, allows the students to have some form of customising. These are limited to the materialisecss colours, available here http://materializecss.com/color.html


I have half developed a way for students to see what they have covered curriculum wise.
But this needs to have a bit more done to it, to show the learning objectives that have been covered.


Red - MODULES
Blue - SPINS

Developing a different way to look at the habits, all the habit indicators have been added to the system and it picks 5 at random that students are to develop some thinking around, wether it is for their own goals or around developing and understanding their learning.




Through one of the reflections to offer opportunities to develop SMART goals more, similar to what Amanda has done here https://amandargreenhalgh.wordpress.com/category/goals/

Through this I have been looking at other ways to pull apart goals.


While it provides opportunities for students to show aspects of the habits, one of the main things I design it to do it is to provide a way for students to do reflections.

The reflective nature of what they have learnt is the focus of a number of research papers.
http://www.ideaedu.org/Resources-Events/Teaching-Learning-Resources/Encouraged-students-to-reflect-on-and-evaluate-what-they-have-learned
https://www.opencolleges.edu.au/informed/features/meaningful-reflection/


How can we provide opportunities for students to do this within hub. I have talked with students about blogger and other opportunities, however they wanted it behind a wall. Many are not yet at the stage where they feel comfortable posting online. Especially Year 9 and Yer 10 students.

What should go into a reflection?

digital information - habit tracking

Getting students to track how they are using there Hobsonville Habits within their learning.

Twitter is such an interesting tool to see how people are using digital technologies within their learning. To gather information and inquire into what is happening with that data.

It started with a tweet...

How Might We show this understanding with our collection of data.

Being able to get the students to enter the data. Making a simple easy to use interface. 

Each day students would be able to change the sliders to indicate their use/understanding/development of the habits.

You might ask about why there are two sliders for each, the top one is for students to enter, the bottom one is for the learning coach.

Once the data is entered, how to best show the patterns, at the moment this is available to the coach only, with future development for the students.

It is at the moment being thought about doing this is in slightly different way, being able to turn on and off habits to be able to show patterns over time.

Notes:

• Keen for some wellbeing/hauora aspects too... so we can keep an eye on that. Could be cool if as well as a ranking, that somehow/somewhere they justify with evidence so not token judgement?
• Complete this one. Perhaps a group of Coaches pilots it and iron out bugs and streamline usage ready for term 2 across school launch.

Digital Information

Working between old standards and new thinking.

The old standards required:

Apply digital information management tools to create a digital information outcome requires students to create a digital information outcome that involves manipulating and combining data from more than one application. The specifications for the digital information outcome, software and techniques to be used need to be determined prior to the outcome being made.

When creating digital information outcomes students will use appropriate techniques and data integrity and testing procedures. Students will apply appropriate file management procedures, design elements, and formatting techniques. Students will consider their legal, ethical, and moral responsibilities when developing digital information outcomes.

While the new one focusses strictly on the database.

Last year I spent time researching and developing ideas into what this could look like, and through a discussion I firmly realised that students get lost between the database and the development of the media. There needed to be more of a focus on what a database can do. Not just the simple work, but to develop the ideas of the power of them. Be it mysql, or sqlite.

Getting students to be able to create a database to hold the data is one thing. Getting them to be able to queries on it to be able to develop the answers that could be used someone else is another.

The focus for my students was to use the khan academy site. Intro to SQL, https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-programming/sql

This provided them real time feedback from the software, suggestion on what to do when they got something wrong. The ability to problem solve, yet to be independent.

I had my doubts when I started it, but even I was impressed at the interaction it provided. It has provided me opportunities to develop my own skills. We didn't stop at the SQL basics. We went through the whole SQL course.

When I think back to what the students were developing and understanding, it was Level 3 NCEA, however these were only Level 2 students. How to show and grasp the information that they had learnt. I think this is where things got difficult. 

However with the new standards, the Level One standard 91879 is around

Develop a digital outcome to manage data involves: 

● using appropriate tools and techniques to structure, organise, query and present data for a purpose and end user 

● applying appropriate data integrity and testing procedures 

● describing relevant implications.

Develop an informed digital outcome to manage data involves: 

● using information from testing procedures to improve the quality and functionality of the outcome 

● structuring, organising and querying the data logically 

● addressing relevant implications

Develop a refined digital outcome to manage data involves:

• iterative improvement throughout the development and testing process 

• presenting the data effectively for the purpose and to meet end-user requirements.

I know one of the ideas around one of the assessments is to be able to bring in a large amount of data, that will need need to be structured or in my case manipulated, to organise that data in a way that it can be used to provide a solution, provide queries against the data.